Not something that happened to me directly, but I was a witness. At the Customer Service desk in the local grocery, I was waiting in line to pick up my new member card since the bar code decal on the old one was peeling off. Three people ahead of me was a middle aged woman with, I swear, the sourest expression I’d ever seen and a voice suited to carry from a stage to the very last row of seats in a huuuge theater.
She was giving the 20-something dark skinned girl with a bit of a spanish accent who was manning the desk a horrible time. Not shouting but PROJECTING, not actually ‘bad word’ swearing but throwing around insults about her, her stupidity, her lack of schooling, her lack of manners, her unhelpfulness, how she ought to be fired, how illegal immigrants were destroying America, how she demanded to speak to a manager – on and on. The employee was blinking back tears by the time I had joined the line.
What was it all about? A $1.00 off coupon for something to do with a Swiffer. The problem? The cashier had refused to honor it! Why? Well, 1) the coupon was over two years expired and 2) the coupon was for a different product than the customer was buying. Apparently the coupon was for a style/size/scent/something? that the store didn’t sell, so the customer had picked up something else Swifferish and wanted them to use it on that instead. Uh-huh. “You’ll have to take it up with Customer Service,” the cashier told her.
So a manager showed up. I don’t know if the employee had called for him or someone had noticed the ruckus. This was when I learned the story of the travesty of the declined coupon. Anyway, manager tries to calm the customer down while still supporting his employee (thank goodness, I hate when management won’t back their employees just to make obnoxious people go away) and pointed out that both the cashier and this clerk were correctly following the store’s rules.
Which set our customer (can we really not call her a Karen?) off on a fresh tirade complete with demands for everyone’s names and the phone number for ‘headquarters’ and she was going to have all three of them fired.
And then she noticed the name tag the clerk was wearing. “N/A?! Not Applicable!!!” she screeched! “You think you can hide your identity? That’s a crime! I’m going to report you to the police too! And you’re probably a wetback and they’ll deport you and your whole family back to whatever hell hole you came from!”
“Huh?” The manager looked baffled for a second, then he said “Her name is Nia. N I A! That’s an I not a slash!”
I admit I snickered. I wasn’t the only one.
Karen paused for a second. Was she going to apologize for her misreading? Hell, no. “Well, that’s a STUPID name! If you want to live in America, at least get a real American name!”
Followed by a bit more ranting, though not quite up to that peak of stupidity. The manager soon told her to take her useless coupon, go, and never come back – and I and the rest of the people in line applauded and cheered a bit as she swung around and stalked out.
Yeeesh. I bet that woman (who, going by her appearance, was not at an economic level where saving a buck would be of any consequence to her) came into the store with a full week’s worth of aggravation already stored up and just searching for a reason to unload it on someone who would just have to stand there and take it.
